


Punch & Plummet

by mindthetarget



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Action, Battlefield, Danger, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Red Room PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-12
Updated: 2015-07-12
Packaged: 2018-04-08 23:56:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4325778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mindthetarget/pseuds/mindthetarget
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nat gets into some trouble during battle and Clint comes up with a crazy way to get her out of it. Red Room PTSD and the handcuff thing come up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Punch & Plummet

Clint hears Tony and Steve freaking out over the comms, but he doesn’t hear Natasha. He can practically see her in his mind’s eye, the way she is probably clenching her jaw right now, that cold hard stare that knifes through the world around her when she’s pissed and waiting for her chance to kill. She wouldn’t show fear, not in the middle of the battle.

Tony Stark and Steve Rogers, however, are very good at freaking out when one of their people are in trouble, and that’s what they’re doing,  _shouting_  over the comms for Thor, because Tony’s not in full suit, just the gauntlets, and Rogers is strong, but he’s using all that strength already just to hold her up, and Natasha is going to fall or lose her arm or endure some other form of permanent damage soon if someone who can fly doesn’t get their butt there pronto.

Clint is already heading that way, not because he can fly, but because someone has to cover them while they’re struggling to keep Natasha from plummeting some eighty stories to the streets, and also because the very fact that Natasha is being so silent, other than the occasional strained grunt, tells him this is bad. So he’s running and jumping from beam to beam on the skyscraper’s construction frame, as fast as he can. It’s a big building; he’s on the other side and only on the sixtieth floor, and it’s not even the same building as the others are on.

“Thor, we need you here  _now!”_  Cap is shouting, and now Clint can see them through the plastic sheeting and plywood and T-beams he’s racing through. They’re across the expanse of sky between this new tower and the Princess Tower, he’s only gained five floors, and they’re still at least a dozen more floors above him and so far away. He’s out of grappling hook arrows so he isn’t going to be able to get there.

Natasha is out the side of the building. Cap has a grip on her belt and the leather around her knee and his feet braced against crumbling parts of the wall, whole body straining to pull. Stark isn’t in sight, and as Clint is noticing this, he hears Tony shouting over the comm that he “can’t get to that room” and it’s “going to take a minute to blast through to her.” He can surmise from this that Tony has run down a flight from where Rogers is to attempt to get to Natasha through the wall from below. Half of the tower is in shambles though, floors collapsed into floors, and Clint is pretty sure Tony’s not going to be able to get to her in time.

There is a huge chunk of swirling obsidian metal about twice the size of Natasha’s body, closed around her wrist as if melded there, hanging in the air and pulling her with it. It is heavy, Clint knows, because he got smacked a couple dozen feet by one about ten minutes ago and was lucky not to be flattened.

They’re not metal. They’re some kind of biomineral form that has four legs that can be either bipedal or run like a cheetah if they want. But they turn into globulous metal blobs when they die that only Mjolnir can put a dent in, and in the process they weld shut around whatever has the misfortune of being engaged with them. They’re not aliens, just parallel universe mineral-based bacteria, Bruce said—he coined them “mineraldytes”—but  _whatever_. They have teeth as big as Clint’s hand, they’re intelligent and know how to hack Stark’s tech, and they weigh what he’s pretty sure is a bajillion pounds when they die and are somehow magnetized toward the core of the earth like drilling machines.

“Nat, how the hell?” he yelps over the comm before he can filter himself. He can never filter—it’s gotta be some kinda disease, right? He winces and quickly apologizes, but he makes the mistake of letting his mouth keep flapping after that. “Just hang on. Don’t rip apart like a cheap Russian scarecrow.”

“Shut. Up,” Nat growls back at him. Now he can hear it, the threat of a scream under her voice, from sheer pain and probably fear too, but she’ll die before she lets that fear actually show.

“I mean, how did you even—what—did you punch it in the  _mouth_?”

“ _SHUT UP, BARTON_ ,” she shouts at him, sharply enough that he jerks his head sideways in vain attempt to escape the comm in his ear.

“Not helping, Hawkeye,” Cap warns. “Thor? Report!”

“I am trying!” Thor responds at last, from wherever he is. There is the clang of his hammer against metallic forms, echoing and brassy and thick at once. “But it is most difficult to evade the creatures. They appear attracted to my armor. I am weighed down!”

“Then take it off!” Clint suggests snappily, because he’s watching Natasha’s face from his perch and can see the strain there; he’s watching her arm be pulled right out of socket by the mineraldyte weighing her down.

He shoots a pair of mineraldytes that are coming at Cap, one skidding just past the supersoldier by inches as it turns to metal and hurtles through a nearby window in its magnetic rush back to earth. Chunks of debris shower Steve and Natasha and Clint feels his heart skip two beats and staccato a dozen when he sees Steve lose his footing a bit and slide forward before he slams his boot into a load-bearing beam and stops again. The jolt of the sudden movement and deceleration pops Natasha’s shoulder at a bad angle and she finally screams, just a short sharp second before she bites hard into her lip and schools her body back into silence.

“I am on the way!” Thor declares at last over comms.

Rogers sucks in another breath, struggles again to pull Natasha upward. His face is turning red, muscles bulging, veins outlined on his body. He doesn’t lift her an inch. “How far?” he demands.

Thor describes some landmarks he is hurtling past, and Clint places them on the map in his head of the region. Too far. Nat’s not going to last that long. Cap might not last that long. Something’s gonna give, be it Captain America’s grip or the Black Widow’s too mortal flesh.

He hates Dubai, he decides. He hates how they feel the need to make buildings so tall they would probably do as much damage as a freaking meteor if they fell to earth. If they didn’t make their buildings so tall, the damn mineraldouches wouldn’t be swarming them and welding them together into a giant cask of parallel universe antennae doom, or whatever it was Stark and Banner had said they were doing. The Avengers wouldn’t be hundreds and hundreds of feet up in the air, battling it out, and Natasha wouldn’t be hanging there getting torn asunder, and if the buildings weren’t so tall they could at least drop her to the ground and figure this out with a little less urgency.

_...drop her to the ground..._

Clint scrambles for a new position, firing arrows to cover Cap’s back even while he runs, and then to cover Tony’s because the engineer has finally appeared, fighting for his own life again, in a window several stories too far below Natasha.

He just needs one minute to get where he needs to be. Natasha might not give him that minute though—she’s drawn a tactical knife, and Clint feels his stomach clench and spin because he knows what she’s thinking. She’s thinking she has to cut her hand off at the wrist if she’s going to get out of this with her life. She’s torqued in such an awkward way though that it’s hard for her to reach, and Cap is yelling at her to hold on, don’t do it, just wait a minute, yelling for Thor and Tony and even for the Hulk, and Clint can hear Natasha’s breath and the way it’s sped up and shallowed a bit. The pain and the potential for her arm to be ripped from her body must be getting to her; she’s starting to panic.

He’s still twenty seconds from where he needs to be.

“It’s not a handcuff, Tash,” he says, and he actually is kind of impressed with how calm and firm he sounds. Good. Calm is good. Calm her down. “Not a handcuff, you’re not back there. You’re okay, I’ve got you. I’m gonna get you out of this.”

He’s so far away, but he can see her face. She’s pale. She doesn’t believe him or can’t hear him, maybe she’s going to that Bad Place in her head.

“ _Natalia_ ,” he presses. “It’s not. A handcuff.”

She hears him. He can tell, because she hesitates in trying to slice at her wrist with her knife. The knife withdraws a few inches and her face swivels as she tries to search for him.

“I’m at your six. Give me one second, Nat, I’ll get you down.”

“Down?” Cap interrupts, reminding Clint that he and Nat are not alone on the comms. “Barton, what’s your plan?”

Clint is finally where he needs to be. He has to shoot another couple dozen mineraldytes for a second or two, lest they overrun Cap and Tony. The Hulk finally appears and bulldozes a lot of them down before disappearing once more through the other side of the building, raging onward. There aren’t many of the enemy left now; the battle is almost over. They just need to get Natasha past the finish line.

“I’m gonna put a net on Nat,” Clint answers Rogers. “Secure her to the stupid pinball.”

“What good will that—”

Tony catches on to what Clint is thinking and blurts over the comm, “They’re centered by an internal magnetized axis! It’ll hit the ground without turning at all, she can be on top, won’t get smooshed!”

“And then keep going! Those things bury themselves in the ground like rocket moles,” Cap points out. “What good will that do? The force of impact alone will—”

“Hulk can catch it, slow it down. And it’s a magnet, right? That’s why they drill down? I can fuck up a magnet,” Clint says. “I’ve got one of those polarity wiping arrows left from last year when we—”

Nat makes a sound that’s ripped from her, like a strangling moan-shriek thing, and Clint shuts his mouth and aims. “Hulk! Move it Big Green, time to play catch! Get on top of it, Nat. Cap, let go!” he says as he lets the arrow with the net in it fly, even at the same instant he hears Tony trying to shout something about the polarity wipers, but it’s hard to hear over his gauntlets’ blasts.

Clint’s arrow hits the glob of dead mineraldyte a split millisecond after Cap reluctantly releases Natasha. She’s already moving, scrambling up, as the net the arrow deploys wraps around her and the blob. He hears her soft grunt when she twists to get in position, because her hand is still trapped immobile in the not-metal, so she’s had to break her wrist.

As she plummets to earth, so damn fast, wrecking ball meteorite under her splayed and clinging form, Clint fires several arrows with miniaturized missile enhancements that speed ahead. They explode in a way that creates a small pressure pillow under the mineraldyte’s descent, slowing the downward speed by the smallest amounts. Clint can hear Hulk on the way, that train-crashing-through-a-pile-of-tanks sound signaling his imminent arrival.

Clint fires the polarity wiper at the last possible moment for it to catch up. He can see the little ‘poof’ of displaced air around the mineraldyte corpse for a moment when it collides, and hopes that means it worked, that the dead creature’s magnetism isn’t about to head for the center of the earth with Natasha still on board.

Then a small mountain of green slams into it from the left, and he holds his breath as he watches the last second or so of the fall with the Hulk braced for impact beneath the metallic blob trying to kill Clint’s partner. He doesn’t wait for them to finally hit before he’s running, jumping, acrobating his way down his building, because he  _needs to be there_.

There’s a lot of dust flying everywhere, and Thor has finally hurtled into the midst of it. Clint hears that dull ringing bang of hammer on deadened mineraldyte, and he hopes that means Thor’s getting Natasha loose.

“Nat?” he says, over the increasing ring of hammering. “ _Nat_.”

Tony is jabbering away, but Clint can’t hear him. All he can hear is Natasha not responding.

He catches Thor’s words when he’s on the forty-fifth floor. “—not breathing. I do not see an injury, but she’s not—”

“ _Nat!”_  Clint roars on the comm. He hears Tony now, remembers why the polarity arrows weren’t supposed to be used in close proximity to the team or anyone living. They have a bad side effect if the thing they demagnetize is too big: they stop hearts.

He’s letting himself fall between floor forty-four and forty-three, ready to roll, when Iron Man snatches him out of the air by his quiver’s strap. Now that the mineraldytes are out of the way and no longer interfering with his computers, it seems Tony has had enough breathing room to get his armor back online and on his person. He is spouting “I told you so” type language at Clint about the polarity arrows, but Clint doesn’t care what Tony Stark wants to say as long as he says it while getting him to Natasha.

It takes only a couple of seconds to get to ground level, a couple of seconds to stumble loose of Tony’s grip and to Natasha. Hulk is already gone, off to fetch Cap or smash one last mineraldyte, Clint doesn’t know or care. Hulk or Thor must have ripped the net away from Nat, and Thor is still hammering at the metal corpse. A large chunk of it has flattened and fallen off, but the part around Natasha’s wrist hasn’t released yet. She lays there, silent and unmoving, eyes open and empty, like a rag doll over Thor’s free arm. In the back of Clint’s head, he registers that Thor is all but naked, so he must have ditched his armor and his clothes to get loose after all. But most of Clint’s focus is on Natasha’s lifeless eyes.

His hands are all over her in a second, her face and her shoulders and her arms, as if by fluttering touches he can revive her. He can’t think, can’t breathe, can’t get his heart to stop jackhammering. Thor finally shoves him away as he sets Natasha down so that Tony can try to jump-start her heart. There is a scent of singed hair after a couple of arc-defibrillator bursts, and some side portion of Clint’s brain recognizes this is Natasha’s hair and maybe her skin, because her hand is still in the metal and getting a little electrified.

She breathes.

Clint makes a sound he won’t believe really came out of him, a kicked dog sound. He grabs at Natasha, barely remembering not to mess with her dislocated arm in his embrace, and then holds her face as he sees her eyes roll with the return of consciousness.

Then she’s screaming, really really screaming. Not like the Black Widow, but like a helpless girl being ripped apart by rabid beasts. She’s clawing at her arm, writhing about in a panic, and Clint does his best to still her before she does more damage to herself. Thor is hammering again, Tony directing his efforts to best disengage the mineraldyte.

“Not a handcuff!” Clint assures Nat. “It’s not, Nat, no, it’s okay, stop!”

He finally wraps his entire body around her, forced to ignore her misshapen shoulder, pinning her hand to her leg and pinning her legs with his own. She still thrashes for a second, but the forced stillness makes her listen to him past her howls.

“It’s not a handcuff, you aren’t being punished, there’s no Red Room, I’ve got you, I’ve got you,  _I’ve got you_ ,” he repeats a dozen times even after she’s quieted.

It takes another five minutes to get the mineraldyte off of Natasha, during which Bruce shows up only half-green anymore, and Cap reaches them too. They all stand about, listening while Clint tells Natasha over and over that she’s safe, that he’s got her, that she’s okay and he’s okay and everything is okay. When the metal finally bends off and her hand is loose enough to move, Cap has to gently retract it from the amorphous corpse, cradling her forearm and palm with care. Her arm is swollen above the wrist and around her shoulder, and the hand is lightly burned from Tony’s effort to shock life back into her system, and that broken wrist is a bad one. All of it can be fixed though. None of it is a dead or broken Natasha.

Clint’s lips in her hair, he murmurs that she’s going to be fine, though he keeps his grip on her a few more seconds while she’s processing the rush of blood and pain because she’s still a little out of herself.

He lets Steve carry her into the carrier plane that comes for them because he can jolt her less than Clint would, but once she’s laying flat on the floor, Clint holds her good hand and smoothes hair back from her sweaty face and grins at her.

“See, now you know, don’t punch things in the mouth, Nat,” he tells her.

He knows she’s going to be okay when she narrows her eyes a teeny bit and gripes, “Going to punch yours if you don’t shut up.”

He believes her, but he harasses her verbally the entire trip to her now-awaiting surgery, because she keeps holding his hand and he knows that means she needs him, all of him and his smart-mouthed habits, to keep her anchored. He only lets go once the anesthesia kicks in, kissing her temple once.

Six months later, she does punch him in the mouth, with her healed hand, and Clint grins through the blood because even after six months all he can think is that he’s grateful she’s there to punch him at all. He kisses her for her trouble, and when she punches him again while cussing him out for getting blood in her mouth, he tells her he loves her too.

**Author's Note:**

> Also posted on [tumblr](http://mindthetarget.tumblr.com/post/123574964960/one-shot-punch-plummet).


End file.
